Looking for some feedback for development initiative...

I'm working on something of a forum system that is a hosted solution for your site. The service in its core form (and quite functional) would be 100% free, probably without ads as I don't find that a viable mechanism to generate revenue considering the Facebooks etc of the world. The big benefit is for people who might fall into the following categories:

Want to integrate their blog (targeting Wordpress/Wix to start) to having comments/discussions spawned from post items.

And -- value their blog/news content and want to ensure you can track discussions on it across the web.

Have a preference running a modern software stack (this is purpose built .NET Core 3 both frontend and backend).

Value privacy/confidentiality and ownership of their data -- I realize that hosted solutions often don't care about this but I think it's important in light of the Facebook debacle to show site administrators as well as users that they are in control of their own data. So if you hate our service and want to go to a traditional forum -- you can export your posts and messages though we'll probably charge a nominal fee for this, just as it's usually a CPU/IO intensive task and we don't want everybody to do that on a whim.

That's the jist… if this piques your interest please let me know. Development is in its infancy because rather than start to build a project my goal is to start conferring with people who have a reasonable sized community, have pain points, and might have an interest in any or all of the above -- or anything that might tickle your fancy you'd like to add. I'm doing some market research right now so I can make sure I build something that people will actually want, and pay attention to the concerns they might have. Of course, the forum is only a component of what I'm building so some of your thoughts may be captured elsewhere but given that the core component is the community based one -- I figured I'd start here. Would greatly appreciate any feedback or thoughts -- feel free to send me a message privately and I'm happy to have a chat.

Is this something you're hosting yourself? If there's no ads, are people paying for you to host it?

Alternatively if this is not something you're hosting yourself, I would be very interested to get some numbers of hosting companies/servers that can run .NET Core 3 applications (because that implies a fairly hefty support drain)

It will be hosted on Azure Web Apps + CosmosDB backend for the data store, and multi-tenanted to ensure scalability and cost. The architecture isn't what I'm worried about as I do that for a living -- I'm more concerned about features and functionality.

And monetization is basically based on a subscription/micro-transaction model, but I don't want to give away the secret sauce of how I intend to keep it running. Suffice to say if you have a simple site (which many are) then it's entirely free and I'm not intending on mucking up your page with ads, or mining your data to pay for it to stand up.